About ZFS in Squeeze (2)

Sometimes it’s nice being wrong. Contrary to what I predicted, ZFS will be supported in Debian Squeeze using the official installer.

This means that Debian Squeeze will be one of the first GNU distributions to support ZFS.

In fact, even though ZFS support didn’t make it to Debian-Installer beta1 by the time it was released, it is now available in the netboot images (this happens because netboot images fetch newer installer components from the internet).

So why did I say something that turned out to be grossly inaccurate? It’s not due to anyone’s fault really. At that time, the version of Parted that included ZFS detection hadn’t migrated to Squeeze. The unblock policy didn’t appear to allow this migration. However, the Release Team kindly decided to make an exception that allowed this, and after Parted had migrated the changes in Debian-Installer itself went in quite smoothly.

It’s so interesting, in fact I’m trying to install debian/kfreebsd but stuck with some problems with grub. I tried with a ZFS / and a ext2 /boot partitions but it fails (among lots of different configurations).

Only configuration worked for me was a UFS / partition and /usr, /var, /tmp and /home with ZFS.

any hint?

I’m also wondering if debian/kfreebsd would be a reliable alternative to install on a production server.

Hmm. I tested todays debian installer for kfreebsd-i386, and I cannot find any zfs support there :( Is this a problem with i386 (I know it is not adviced, but i REALLY want zfs on my 32-bit box, as it nows works on by FreeBSD without problems), or there are still some integration needed.

I’ve a question about how you’re going to support the coming FreeBSD (kernel) releases hence ZFS releases. Are we going to see new FreeBSD 8.2,..8.x kernels landing on Debian kFreeBSD or only back-porting fixes to 8.1?

Thanks in advance and I can’t wait to celebrate the release of Debian 6 :)

I don’t think anyone will be into backporting ZFS to older kFreeBSD versions. So if you use kFreeBSD 8.1, you get ZFS 14. If you want newer ZFS you’ll need to upgrade to kFreeBSD 8.2, or to kFreeBSD 9.

However, when it comes to the distribution, it’s likely that backports of the kernel packages are provided.

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there the main problem why any linux distribution haven’t implemented ZFS into it with the licence, which wasn’t compatible with the one of GNU’s ?
It’s only what I remember from some other articles, so perhaps I might be wrong in some details, but this was the first thing which came to my mind when I noticed this ZFS & Squeeze info.

It’s an operating system based on GNU, and it supports many kernels, including Linux, the Hurd, or the kernel of FreeBSD (kFreeBSD for short).

kFreeBSD in particular has had ZFS support since 2007. Debian added the missing bits (utilities, installer support) a few months ago. So when you use Debian with the kernel of FreeBSD, you get ZFS support now.

I’ve did some tests with the “mini.iso” and I found out that you can’t rename the root pool created during installation. That’s quite annoying, cause the installer use something like “hostname-device” as pool name and would be much more simplier if you can use something like “rpool” or “tank”.

Do you have any ideias on how to pick up another nome for the root pool? I tried to create it with zpool during install using another terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2) but when I got back to the menu, it says that there’s only free space on the disk.

With it being uncertain what will come out of Oracle how do you think ZFS will progress. I’m thinking of the difference beween the OpenIndiana version of ZFS and the one which comes with Solaris Express. Do you expect Oracle to release the source which will allow it to be ported to Linux?